Jennifer Moxley, _The Open Secret_

 READING MOXLEY'S NEW book of essays brought to mind that I was a couple of collections behind on her--a mistake, given that she is one of my favorite poets, but easily fixed, no?

Handsomely designed (by Quemadura, which I think is Jeff Clark), The Open Secret (2014) works mainly with the somewhat relaxed but basically iambic pentameter blank verse line that Moxley has been using for quite a while now. The rhythm of her line and her willingness to use sophisticated syntax (she puts me in mind of James Merrill in that regard) combine to give her work a traditional cast--without, however, it ever sounding like a fetishistic or finicky re-production. It stays firmly contemporary in its concerns.

Highlights for me in The Open Secret were two longer poems, "Coastal" and "Evacuations." 

"Coastal" is a letter to a friend, painter Monique Van Genderen, that rolls out with the same sense of intimate-communication-meets-major-artistic-statement that we hear in the poems Wordsworth and Coleridge addressed to each other or in Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Moxley touches on 9/11 in one passage, in another on how hard it is to find a patty melt in Maine. She can be hilariously dead serious:

How would you like the politics in your poetry?
How about in your painting? Romantic and sad
or smart and structural? Whatever your answer
you will leave here thinking you've done
a little something for the good of mankind.
BUT IN THIS CASE YOU'D BE WRONG!

"Evacuations" somehow reminded me of Coleridge, too, the Coleridge of "Frost at Midnight" or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," where he seems to be just following a thought wherever it goes, but in more of a butterfly line than a beeline. The butterfly in this case hovers around a lot of serious questions for contemporary writing--the nature of the present, of resistance, of naming--but here again irony, a sense of the ridiculous, and matter-of-fact lucidity leaven the poem and keep it from sinking into ponderousness.

Moxley is one of America's best living poets, for my money.